


Blind.

by Rehearsal_Dweller



Series: Twin Trade AU [4]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Parallel Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4500327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rehearsal_Dweller/pseuds/Rehearsal_Dweller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All summer, they've been tracking down mysteries in Gravity Falls. Who knew the biggest one started in their own house?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blind.

**Author's Note:**

> This has taken me ages to write.  
> Have some Society of the Blind Eye!

The laptop was smashed.

(That was… embarrassing. Honestly, Ursa had never made a worse mistake. She was lucky she was even alive; the laptop was a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.)

The laptop was smashed, but Ursa was still determined to figure this Blind-Eye thing out.

She pulled her ‘suspicious characters’ board out from under the bed and propped it against the wall. Then she rocked back, sitting on her feet, trying to find a connection she hadn’t seen before.

She had, thus far, been unsuccessful.

Max burst into the room, a green glass bottle in hand, and jumped onto Ursa’s bed. Ursa barely registered him entering the room until he nearly launched her off of the bed.

“Look what Iiiiiiiii’ve got!” Max said, waving the bottle around.

“A vessel for that ship-in-a-bottle project Grunkle Ford wants to do with you?” Ursa guessed idly, not really paying attention.

“ _No_ ,” replied Max, elbowing her. “It’s a bottle message from Sirena! Remember her? She was part fish, and part pretty girl…”

Ursa let her brother babble, nodding and making little ‘I’m listening’ sounds at appropriate times. All the while, she continued to stare at her board.

“Hey, Urs,” Max said, elbowing her. “Look at this!”

He was gesturing enthusiastically to - with? - his (now empty) bottle.

“Why?” Ursa asked dully.

“Because it’s – would you just look!”

Max actually put his hand on the top of her head and _made_ her turn and look at what he was trying to show her.

Which was, apparently, that bottle-message bottles make good magnifying lenses. And that there was something written in very small print on a tag inside the smashed laptop.

“McGucket Labs,” Ursa read aloud. She looked at Max, stunned. “Like, Old Lady McGucket? We have to go talk to her!”

\--

Granddad caught Ursa by the collar as she and Max thundered down the stairs and toward the gift shop.

“What are you two up to?” he asked once she was still and steady on her feet again.

“We’re going on a mystery hunt!” Ursa said, grinning widely. “I may have just had a breakthrough. Oh, and we’re taking Soos and Wendy.” She popped up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “We’ll be back by dark. Bye Granddad!”

And then she took off running again.

“What about work?” Granddad called after her. “Get back here!”

\--

“Ms McGucket!” Ursa called as they entered the junkyard. “Ms McGucket, we need to talk to you!”

Before long, the junkyard’s eccentric inhabitant came out of her hut to greet them, and invite them ‘inside.’

“Mrs McG, do you recognise this laptop?” asked Max, pulling it out of Ursa’s backpack.

“I – I’m not sure,” replied McGucket.

“We found it in the Stans’ lab,” Wendy said. “It has your name in it.”

“Which either means that it’s _yours_ or that you made it,” Ursa added. “This laptop is the biggest clue I’ve found all summer; I’ve been trying to investigate this secret society and – oh!” She dug her journal out of her backpack and flipped it open. “Do you recognise this symbol?”

McGucket shrieked and stumbled backward. “The Blind Eye!”

\--

“Soos, when did you learn how to pick locks?”

Soos waved vaguely. “Mr Pines said that it was an important life skill.”

Max giggled. “Yeah, that’s how we learned, too.”

Ursa shushed them. “Guys, focus!” She pulled Max and Wendy forward by the arms. “Keep an eye out for clues.”

In the end, it was McGucket who sort of accidentally sort of on purpose led them to the Society’s lair. The stairway was tucked away in a hidden corner of the museum, and it was dark and shadowy, like someone had made it ominous on purpose.

“We’ll have to be stealthy,” Max said as they started to creep down the stairs.

“I’ll hambone a message if there’s trouble!” McGucket announced brightly, before presumably demonstrating just that.

“Wow. I’m sure that would be super helpful if I had any idea what it meant.” Ursa shook her head, then signed, _“You know ASL?”_

“Nope!” replied McGucket.

Max rolled his eyes at Ursa. _“What did you think?”_

 _“She understood what I said,”_ Ursa pointed out.

“That’s weird,” Max said out loud. “How could you forget that you know a language?”

Ursa shrugged. “ _Don’t know_.”

\--

“Did they just _wipe Tyler’s memory_?”

“I think they did,” whispered Ursa. “But how is that even possible?”

“That gun thing must be some kind of mind-eraser!” Max said excitably, his voice rising to nearly a shout before Wendy bopped him on the head to quiet him. “Sorry.”

McGucket frowned.

“We should figure out where the memories are kept,” Ursa said, her brow furrowed. “This is probably why you don’t remember anything, McGucket! We’ll find your memories, and maybe this’ll all make sense.”

\--

“That doesn’t make any sense, Max,” Wendy said.

Max would’ve glared at her, had he not had her had pulled over his eyes. “Does so. I’m _cursed_ , I tell you.”

Wendy chuckled. “That’s not how it works, man. Sometimes you’re just unlucky.”

“But, like, _every_ time I get involved with somebody? All summer?” insisted Max.

“Dude, you’re twelve,” Wendy reminded him. She nudged him with her toe. “You’ve got some time to figure it out.”

Max groaned and slid down the wall, Wendy’s hat slipping forward over his face. “I wish I could just forget about romance all together. It’s too much –“

Suddenly, Max sat bolt upright, whipping the hat off of his face and squeezing it tightly. “Forget about romance!”

Wendy, who could see where this was going, shook her head. “Oooh, no, man. That’s a bad idea.”

“What’re you talkin’ about?” Max said dismissively. “This is an _awesome_ idea.”

“Y’know, I really don’t think so.”

“Nah, look. They’ve obviously been doing this for years. Don’t you think they would’ve _stopped_ if there was some awful side-effect?”

“Maxie, you have _seen_ Old Lady McGucket, right?” Wendy said. She grabbed her hat and bopped Max with it.

“Aw, Wendy, I’ll be fine.”

\--

“Woah.”

Ursa, Soos, and McGucket had chased Soos’s hat through the museum, to another hidden room full of dusty tubes. Each one was labelled with the name of someone from town. Some were up on shelves, neatly organised, and others had been thrown into higgledy-piggledly piles all over the floor.

“Now all we’ve got to do is find McGucket’s,” said Ursa. She sighed. “In all of this.”

So they started to search. Each of them took a different wedge of the room and set to rifling through the piles and plies of memory tubes.

“Hey, dude, I found it!” Soos called after a few minutes.

Ursa spun around on the ball of her foot, nearly overbalancing and tipping sideways. She was midway through a delighted exclamation when she noticed one of the creepy hooded figures moving out of the shadows toward Soos. “Look out!”

But she was too late.

\--

When Max came to, he was tied to a pillar between Wendy and Ursa. What looked like the entire Society was standing around them.

After some prodding, the Society members revealed themselves. Mostly they were ordinary town people, people that they’d met before. Ursa convinced their leader to explain the Society, its goals and purpose.

(She looked rather pleased with herself at that, despite the dire situation, as in one villainous monologue she’d basically accomplished her ultimate summer goal. Well, almost.)

Unfortunately, post-monologue, Ivan decided it was high time that he wiped their brains, which was not so favourable.

“Uh, guys, if we’re gonna forget everything, there’s some stuff I wanna get off my chest,” Soos said. “Uh, Max? For like half the summer, I thought your name was _Matt_. Nobody corrected me!”

“I’m actually super insecure,” Max admitted, wincing. “About my braces, my hairclips, all of it. It’s killing me.”

“I let all of this mystery stuff get ahead of me sometimes and I go rushing into things without thinking,” Ursa blurted. “You’re all going to get your memories erased and it’s all my fault!”

“Okay, I’m not really laid back,” said Wendy. “I’m actually stressed, like, all the time. Have you _met_ my family?”

Their confessions blurred into apologies, all conflicting and spoken over each other.

McGucket saved the day, jumping in to free them just before Ivan could shoot them with the memory-eraser. She’d brought weapons – well, potential weapons – and passed them around so that they could fight back.

\--

By the time all of the Society members had been to some degree or other incapacitated, all five of them were bruised and scraped, and McGucket had been shot with the memory gun three times to apparently no effect.

They sent the _former_ (now memory-wiped) Society members on their way, then returned to the secret lair.

“You ready for this, McG?” Wendy asked.

McGucket took a deep breath, and nodded.

Ursa clicked the memory tube into the recall player. The screen flickered to life, showing a young McGucket holding the very same memory eraser as the one now tucked into Ursa’s backpack.

“ _My name is Geraldine Nebula McGucket, and I wish to unsee what I have seen.”_

McGucket gasped.

“ _For the past year, I’ve been working as an assistant for my college friend, Ford Pines. He has been studying Gravity Falls and cataloguing his findings in a series of journals. I helped him to build a machine which, he believes, has the potential to benefit all mankind.”_ Young Geraldine shook her head, looking haunted. “ _Something went wrong. I decided to leave the project, but I can’t shake the thoughts of what I’ve done. I’ve invented a machine that should permanently erase these memories from my mind.”_ She took a deep breath and held the eraser up to her temple. “ _Test subject one: Dina.”_

Ursa’s breath caught; there was no way this was true. If McGucket – Dina – had been working with Grunkle Ford, surely he’d have known?

He would have _done_ something, rather than let his friend –

She glanced at McGucket, as they watched the record of her descent into scattered incoherency, not quite madness but definitely not the same.

By the time they reached the point in McGucket’s forgotten recollections where she’d clearly wound up in a motel, injured and alone, Ursa couldn’t watch anymore.

“I gotta go,” she muttered to Max. Without waiting for a response, she took off for home.

\--

“Ford.”

“Oh, hey, Ursa,” Grunkle Ford said, looking up from his project. “What happened to you? I didn’t know you were on a hunt today.”

Ursa wiped away a small trickle of blood from her cheek. “I told Granddad.”

Ford reached for the small first aid kit on the side table. “Here, let me patch you up.”

“No!” snapped Ursa. She shook her head. “No, I’m fine. We need to talk, Grunkle Ford.”

Ford looked reluctant, but curious. He left the first aid kit where it was, but came around his desk and leaned against it. “What’s wrong, Ursa?”

“We went to see Old Lady McGucket today,” Ursa said. She crossed her arms tightly, the fingers of one hand digging into her t-shirt. “Dina. I’m sure you remember her, apparently you used to be friends?”

“What?” said Ford, frowning. “That is, we were, but –“

“I learned some stuff today. Stuff you didn’t want me to know,” Ursa interrupted. “I know why you didn’t want me looking into the Society of the Blind Eye, now.”

“It’s too dangerous, you could’ve gotten hurt.”

Ursa let out a forced laugh. “Sure, you stick with that if you want to.”

“Ursa –“ Ford started, taking a step toward her.

She flinched away. “Stay _away_ from me. Dina McGucket worked with you, and something you did upset her so much that she wiped her memory and went completely _crazy_ pants.”

“Look, Ursa, that isn’t what –“

“What? It’s not what _happened_?” Ursa snapped. “I _saw_ what happened, Ford. I watched her memories as she fell apart!”

“I didn’t know what was happening,” Ford told her. “I swear I didn’t. I was pretty shaken up then, too, and –“

“It’s been _thirty years!”_ shouted Ursa. “Not once in thirty years did you stop to wonder what happened? You’ve seen her around, you can’t fool me. You saw her fall apart and you did _nothing!”_ She had been steadily backing away as she spoke, and now she hit the wall. “How could you let this happen? She was your friend! She trusted you, worked for you, just like –“ She gasped, one hand flying to her mouth while the other tightened its grip on her shirt. “Just like _me._ Oh my god, this could – what if it were me?”

Ford faltered, his mouth falling open.

“ _Ford!_ What if it were me?” she repeated. “Would – would you have just –“ She let out a choked sob.

“Ursa, you know we love you,” Ford said, finally regaining his voice. He looked concerned “We would never let anything –“

“Shut UP!” Ursa screamed. “I don’t – how can I _ever_ trust you again?”

\--

Granddad found her later, sitting near the top of the attic stairs with her knees pulled to her chest.

“Woah,” he said. “What happened to you, kiddo?”

Ursa pressed her eyes to her knees for a moment before looking up. “All summer, I’ve been relying on Stan and Ford to look out for me if I get into trouble. If I can’t trust them, what am I gonna do?”


End file.
